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Deeply disagree. Looking at the current selfhosted landscape and saying "nice but nobody will want to do this" is like looking around in 1970 and saying "nobod

Deeply disagree. Looking at the current selfhosted landscape and saying "nice but nobody will want to do this" is like looking around in 1970 and saying "nobody will want to own computers, you just rent them for tasks". I say this after copious amounts of invested time over a timespan of 15 years to selfhost. The software landscape changed immensely. Especially now with AI, the software output and ability to learn is night and day. Software projects specifically targeting selfhosting as a mission is a somewhat new phenomena, before we had small business/enterprise tools that just happened to be down-scaleable for personal needs. We're not very far off to have great - and not just okay - click-to-install solutions. If you don't own your infra, you are dependent. "Community hosting" is just hosting with a less reliable and more finicky admin. E2E on corporate cloud is nice but the price and terms may change any day. E2E in cloud itself is under scrutiny. A for-profit will bow to whatever legal framework they operate in. They will always want to increase those profits, easiest way for that is at the cost of what they own: the userbase and their data. Selfhosted security is an issue, but individual users are harder to scrape/target and offer less of a bounty beyond basic/defeatable script attacks. Instead of a defeatist attitude why not just solve the issues, they're not that hard.

youatme 1y ago
[dead]
- A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 1y ago
  I would hesitate before entrusting that kind of hardware to an AI agent. It is an interesting idea, but what if it decides full format is necessary? In my personal anecdata of where AI went wrong, at least I was the human in the middle to stop the bad decision. At best, you end up with a Simpson level nuclear plant terminal, where Homer is just trained to press Y each time it sees a prompt. I guess what I am saying is: some LLM integration may be worthwhile. Separately, on a more serious note, what makes this offer that different from its competition?
em-bee 1y ago
how are you disagreeing? self-hosting is not being ruled out. do you think me, my siblings, our parents and children, each of us should self-host their stuff when we could perfectly well just share one machine? we are going to trust each other. but why wouldn't we. it's easier to share our photo albums this way. it's that or facebook. pretty much. and again, self-hosting is not ruled out, it's still an option. what robert says is that regardless of the choice we need self-sovereignty. that is orthogonal. you are still free to self-host. but we have to face the reality that not everyone is going to do it. even if we have the tools to make self-hosting easy.
- poisonborz 1y ago
  > each of us should self-host their stuff when we could perfectly well just share one machine? Actually yes. The golden rule of selfhosting is that you don't host for others. Then you are just hosting, with all the annoyance that comes with it. Also I might have different needs than my siblings, different software, settings and so on. Extreme example: police warrant for a sibling, and they take the family server away? Who is legally responsible for what is hosted there? Families could share a single car, or a single bathroom, realistically multiple families even - yet anyone who can afford it will opt to avoid that. So along with sovereignty I will always opt for the most independence and freedom. The only reason people think otherwise is because because of alleged technical infeasibility.
  - em-bee 1y ago
    it's not technical infeasibility, it's lack of personal capacity, either skill or time wise. some people simply can't do that, so if i want them to share things with me i have to make it easy for them. the alternative is facebook (or something else like it). and i am not talking about hosing for your own private use but for shared use. family photos for example, chats, other family stuff. there isn't going to be a warrant because i see everything that is posted. if he needs different software he can still host that himself, that's besides the point. i am not running a hosting service, i am running a platform for the family to use. a private facebook alternative. i don't know about your family relationships, but for me family means to support and stand by each other.
Retr0id 1y ago
> "nobody will want to own computers, you just rent them for tasks" Very prescient indeed for someone in 1970 to predict the success of AWS
- harvey9 1y ago
  We had timesharing on mainframes. Everything old is new again.
- ants_everywhere 1y ago
  That's how computers were before the rise of personal computers
  - Retr0id 1y ago
    That was GP's point, it's just also how things are today.
    - hdgvhicv 1y ago
      These things are cyclical. History doesn’t repeat, but it does rhyme.
- loceng 1y ago
  Until you understand how 1984 extrapolates with today's technologies - and the only defense against corrupt-captured state(s) and industrial complexes toeing the establishment line, in ever increasing consolidation of so-called power-control, is decentralized-distributed tech - and then where the centralization [especially physical infrastructure] becomes their major weakness; yes, there is the control of means of production-funnel of resources-energy issue but if shit really hits the fan than guerilla tactics appear to always reign supreme, whereby major supply lines, energy production, an CPU architecture will be first to be targeted. The bad actors through subversion are currently attempting their best to not cause panic for the herds to react more strongly and more quickly than their apparatus they're currently ready to handle [at least that they believe they're ready to handle] - however things can fall apart very quickly, the Berlin wall fell much sooner than practically all predicted.
velomash 1y ago
The UX vs value provided for self hosting doesn’t make sense for normal people
irishloop 1y ago
> If you don't own your infra, you are dependent. You're dependent regardless. You are dependent on your service provider, your hardware, your UPS battery backup, your RAID drives being easily replaced, your backups. It reminds me of people who raise their own chickens and think they're living off the grid. But they need the materials to build the coop, the chicken feed, fencing, etc.
- dingnuts 1y ago
  You grow the chicken feed nearby on your farm and you create materials by hand I mean sure there are a lot of Instagram homesteaders that are obviously cosplaying but you are making the comment like you've never known anybody that lives in the deep backwoods, I mean, just spend a few years living in deep Appalachia and you'll see what I mean. Folks don't have the same style of living you have in mind but they are probably closer to subsistence farming than you'd give them credit for. Now, these people will buy tools at Walmart, because they are just surviving and not cosplaying, but they'd also get by if Walmart disappeared. They're a lot less dependent than I am.
- dare944 1y ago
  Not sure what your point is. The ability to manufacture silicon chips will only ever be in the hands of a relatively small group of people worldwide. So of course all of us are dependent on these people/businesses to do any form of modern computing. The question isn't how can we live without dependencies. It's how many dependencies must we have? And of those that aren't strictly necessary, what are the benefits (and costs) of breaking them?
  - ndriscoll 1y ago
    It's also a matter of capital vs operational dependency. Intel needs to exist today to buy a chip, but my 9 year old mid range desktop still works fine and is perfectly snappy today, and I suspect my minipcs (which draw as much power as a lightbulb or two, so could easily be solar/battery powered) will also work fine for at least a decade. I can't imagine needing more computing power than an N100 provides for a home server; mine is already 99% idle. So these things will basically never be obsolete. I suspect the actual chips will last the rest of my life at least, so even if a capacitor fails on the motherboard, the skills to replace those are considerably more common if CPU manufacturers were to fail somehow (or if new hardware became unusable due to DRM or something).
mnahkies 1y ago
A basic way to head off most of the security issues is throwing it behind a VPN (eg: wireguard) - no need to put stuff on the public internet if it's just for your own consumption. You can still include your mobile devices etc. Separately I think k8s is a solution to much of the difficulty. I don't use it outside of work as the baseline costs are too much (my personal cloud bill is under $10 and I want to keep it in that range), but the packaging offered by well maintained helm charts is hard to pass by - people dunk on it for being complex but imo it only exposes inherent complexity and simplifies a lot of other stuff.
raybb 1y ago
Selfhosting has been tricky for a while. It's still not simple but things like https://Coolify.io https://Coolify.io (selfhosted Heroku) make it so so much easier to maintain and feel more dependable. Backups and upgrades will still be tricky but they seem resolvable.
benreesman 1y ago
There's a spectrum OP / their LLM (hat tip the disclaimer, not shade) I think blurs into this false dichotomy. Maybe the hardware is on my desk or in my closet, maybe its on a VPS or bare metal provider with standard IPMI, maybe its a proprietary cloud image with deep packet inspection rejecting connections from legitimate enterprise VPN subnet relays (cough Cloud SQL). At some point you're dependent on a registrar and an ISP (or maybe you the thing like infinite LAN party, sick), and at some point the cops show up if you're too far out of bounds (in their view). In 2025 my compromise is to prefer interchangeable bare metal providers and interchangeable S3-compatible providers and ship the same stack to there and to my desk. And park the domains with Njalla and Gandi. And have servers in complicated jurisdictions where fucking with them is a Great Power turf war. It's not perfect, but its what an individual can do with nixpkgs and an attitude problem towards unaccountable authority.

youatme 1y ago

[dead]

A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 1y ago
I would hesitate before entrusting that kind of hardware to an AI agent. It is an interesting idea, but what if it decides full format is necessary? In my personal anecdata of where AI went wrong, at least I was the human in the middle to stop the bad decision. At best, you end up with a Simpson level nuclear plant terminal, where Homer is just trained to press Y each time it sees a prompt. I guess what I am saying is: some LLM integration may be worthwhile. Separately, on a more serious note, what makes this offer that different from its competition?

em-bee 1y ago

how are you disagreeing? self-hosting is not being ruled out. do you think me, my siblings, our parents and children, each of us should self-host their stuff when we could perfectly well just share one machine? we are going to trust each other. but why wouldn't we. it's easier to share our photo albums this way. it's that or facebook. pretty much. and again, self-hosting is not ruled out, it's still an option. what robert says is that regardless of the choice we need self-sovereignty. that is orthogonal. you are still free to self-host. but we have to face the reality that not everyone is going to do it. even if we have the tools to make self-hosting easy.

poisonborz 1y ago
> each of us should self-host their stuff when we could perfectly well just share one machine? Actually yes. The golden rule of selfhosting is that you don't host for others. Then you are just hosting, with all the annoyance that comes with it. Also I might have different needs than my siblings, different software, settings and so on. Extreme example: police warrant for a sibling, and they take the family server away? Who is legally responsible for what is hosted there? Families could share a single car, or a single bathroom, realistically multiple families even - yet anyone who can afford it will opt to avoid that. So along with sovereignty I will always opt for the most independence and freedom. The only reason people think otherwise is because because of alleged technical infeasibility.
- em-bee 1y ago
  it's not technical infeasibility, it's lack of personal capacity, either skill or time wise. some people simply can't do that, so if i want them to share things with me i have to make it easy for them. the alternative is facebook (or something else like it). and i am not talking about hosing for your own private use but for shared use. family photos for example, chats, other family stuff. there isn't going to be a warrant because i see everything that is posted. if he needs different software he can still host that himself, that's besides the point. i am not running a hosting service, i am running a platform for the family to use. a private facebook alternative. i don't know about your family relationships, but for me family means to support and stand by each other.

Retr0id 1y ago

> "nobody will want to own computers, you just rent them for tasks" Very prescient indeed for someone in 1970 to predict the success of AWS

harvey9 1y ago
We had timesharing on mainframes. Everything old is new again.
ants_everywhere 1y ago
That's how computers were before the rise of personal computers
- Retr0id 1y ago
  That was GP's point, it's just also how things are today.
  - hdgvhicv 1y ago
    These things are cyclical. History doesn’t repeat, but it does rhyme.
loceng 1y ago
Until you understand how 1984 extrapolates with today's technologies - and the only defense against corrupt-captured state(s) and industrial complexes toeing the establishment line, in ever increasing consolidation of so-called power-control, is decentralized-distributed tech - and then where the centralization [especially physical infrastructure] becomes their major weakness; yes, there is the control of means of production-funnel of resources-energy issue but if shit really hits the fan than guerilla tactics appear to always reign supreme, whereby major supply lines, energy production, an CPU architecture will be first to be targeted. The bad actors through subversion are currently attempting their best to not cause panic for the herds to react more strongly and more quickly than their apparatus they're currently ready to handle [at least that they believe they're ready to handle] - however things can fall apart very quickly, the Berlin wall fell much sooner than practically all predicted.

velomash 1y ago

The UX vs value provided for self hosting doesn’t make sense for normal people

irishloop 1y ago

> If you don't own your infra, you are dependent. You're dependent regardless. You are dependent on your service provider, your hardware, your UPS battery backup, your RAID drives being easily replaced, your backups. It reminds me of people who raise their own chickens and think they're living off the grid. But they need the materials to build the coop, the chicken feed, fencing, etc.

dingnuts 1y ago
You grow the chicken feed nearby on your farm and you create materials by hand I mean sure there are a lot of Instagram homesteaders that are obviously cosplaying but you are making the comment like you've never known anybody that lives in the deep backwoods, I mean, just spend a few years living in deep Appalachia and you'll see what I mean. Folks don't have the same style of living you have in mind but they are probably closer to subsistence farming than you'd give them credit for. Now, these people will buy tools at Walmart, because they are just surviving and not cosplaying, but they'd also get by if Walmart disappeared. They're a lot less dependent than I am.
dare944 1y ago
Not sure what your point is. The ability to manufacture silicon chips will only ever be in the hands of a relatively small group of people worldwide. So of course all of us are dependent on these people/businesses to do any form of modern computing. The question isn't how can we live without dependencies. It's how many dependencies must we have? And of those that aren't strictly necessary, what are the benefits (and costs) of breaking them?
- ndriscoll 1y ago
  It's also a matter of capital vs operational dependency. Intel needs to exist today to buy a chip, but my 9 year old mid range desktop still works fine and is perfectly snappy today, and I suspect my minipcs (which draw as much power as a lightbulb or two, so could easily be solar/battery powered) will also work fine for at least a decade. I can't imagine needing more computing power than an N100 provides for a home server; mine is already 99% idle. So these things will basically never be obsolete. I suspect the actual chips will last the rest of my life at least, so even if a capacitor fails on the motherboard, the skills to replace those are considerably more common if CPU manufacturers were to fail somehow (or if new hardware became unusable due to DRM or something).

mnahkies 1y ago

A basic way to head off most of the security issues is throwing it behind a VPN (eg: wireguard) - no need to put stuff on the public internet if it's just for your own consumption. You can still include your mobile devices etc. Separately I think k8s is a solution to much of the difficulty. I don't use it outside of work as the baseline costs are too much (my personal cloud bill is under $10 and I want to keep it in that range), but the packaging offered by well maintained helm charts is hard to pass by - people dunk on it for being complex but imo it only exposes inherent complexity and simplifies a lot of other stuff.

raybb 1y ago

Selfhosting has been tricky for a while. It's still not simple but things like https://Coolify.io https://Coolify.io (selfhosted Heroku) make it so so much easier to maintain and feel more dependable. Backups and upgrades will still be tricky but they seem resolvable.

benreesman 1y ago

There's a spectrum OP / their LLM (hat tip the disclaimer, not shade) I think blurs into this false dichotomy. Maybe the hardware is on my desk or in my closet, maybe its on a VPS or bare metal provider with standard IPMI, maybe its a proprietary cloud image with deep packet inspection rejecting connections from legitimate enterprise VPN subnet relays (cough Cloud SQL). At some point you're dependent on a registrar and an ISP (or maybe you the thing like infinite LAN party, sick), and at some point the cops show up if you're too far out of bounds (in their view). In 2025 my compromise is to prefer interchangeable bare metal providers and interchangeable S3-compatible providers and ship the same stack to there and to my desk. And park the domains with Njalla and Gandi. And have servers in complicated jurisdictions where fucking with them is a Great Power turf war. It's not perfect, but its what an individual can do with nixpkgs and an attitude problem towards unaccountable authority.